Strauss & co - 1 June 2015, Johannesburg

214 While experimenting in the enormous, slow-drying trolley kilns at the Corobrik headquarters for her Earthworks/Claybodies show, Deborah Bell took note of a particular mix of dense clay being extruded from the commercial pugmills. Removed from the production line before being cut into building bricks, these long, stone-like slabs, quite unlike the more familiar, malleable clay in which she had worked before, presented the starting points for a series of figures. Beginning with rather narrow and hardened columnar blocks, and armed with a heavy wooden paddle, Bell chose to ‘bludgeon the clay’ into rudimentary, standing bodies, before beginning to carve out the necessary details of individual figures. 1 At this point the features of each form were uncertain in her mind’s eye, but she felt inclined to accept that ‘the shape will suggest which images will appear’. 2 What began to emerge, she recalled, as headpieces were defined and steady expressions fixed, was a group of guardians and sentinels which, together, came to symbolise the protective qualities of ‘fortitude, constancy and eternal stability’. 3 Each Sentinel brings to mind the slender, stern and stylised Gothic figures carved out of medieval cathedral columns; each might conjure formal and spiritually-charged reliquary statues too. The Sentinels , moreover, like so many other fine examples from Bell’s oeuvre, also show how deeply she drew her visual vocabulary from wide-ranging, global mythologies and religions. These figures, consequently, particularly those immortalised in bronze, remain enduring, composed and reassuring, while each evokes a sense of peace, permanence and calm. Bell conceded that the group was ‘a leap in faith’– it was certainly one for which she was rewarded. 4 1–4 Pippa Stein. (2004) Deborah Bell , Johannesburg: David Krut Publishing. Page 77. 284 detail